This paper investigates the performance of Germany's three-pillar banking system in providing financial services nationwide, regarding different outreach indicators. At the federal state level, bank outreach shows South-North and West-East gaps. Combining regional and bank data at the district...

Insurance markets are characterized by profound market imperfections. Insurance intermediaries reduce transaction costs and information asymmetries. From transaction cost economics, agency theory, and law and economics literature the hypothesis is derived that insurance brokers may provide more...

Insurance products are distributed both by independent and dependent agents, although the use of independent agents is more costly. The product quality hypothesis states that independent agents provide both insurers and customers with higher service quality and therefore, remain on the market....

Until its liberalisation in 1994 exclusive agents dominated the distribution of products in the German life insurance industry. Since then, their importance has been declining for the benefit of both distribution via direct distribution channel and independent agents. However, the market shares...

We apply different matched-pair methods to evaluate the policy of sustaining the adoption of advanced manufacturing technologies by Swiss firms and we compare it in decomposing the selection bias. In this aim we present the evaluation problem, the decomposition of the selection bias and the...

The paper aims at explaining empirically the diffusion of E-commerce based on two largescale sample surveys conducted in the Swiss economy. The paper adds to previous work in two ways: firstly, we estimate separate models for E-selling and E-purchasing, and, secondly, we distinguish between...

The paper aims at a joint analysis of inter-firm and intra-firm diffusion of technology, taking as an example E-selling and E-purchasing. The analysis is based on an encompassing model of diffusion, drawn from the literature, which is extended by considering technology-specific obstacles and...

The present paper estimates and decomposes the employment effect of innovation by R&D intensity levels. Our micro-econometric analysis is based on a large international panel data set from the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard. Employing flexible semi-parametric methods - the generalised...